OUT OF THIS WORLDSpace t r a v e l h a s become an obses s i on among

con t empo r a r y a r t i s t s who a r e r e - enac t i n g

j ou r ne y s t o Ma r s , mak i ng r ep l i c a t e s o f

a s t r onau t g ea r, e v en t r a i n i ng w i t h NASA

B Y A N N L A N D I

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Tom Sachs’s studioteam prepares for hisreenactment of a tripto Mars at the ParkAvenue Armory.

Nearly 50 years ago, the United States space program was the pride of the nation,a beacon of hope in an otherwise bloody and tumultuous era. NASA, spurred by competition from theRussians, sent astronauts into space and put a man on the moon. The New Frontier seemed to offer limit-less opportunities for expansion and exploration, and the possibilities gripped the imagination of a gener-ation. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey became the cinematic touchstone for a dreamy andapocalyptic vision of space travel, and visual artists as diverse as Robert Rauschenberg and NormanRockwell celebrated a new age of superheroes and conquest.Five decades later, even as the space program is winding down, artists continue to look to the heavens

for imagery and inspiration. Lee Bontecou, for example, 80 years old and at the peak of her powers, re-cently showed works described by ARTnews critic Barbara Pollack as a “trio of starships . . . hanging fromthe gallery’s ceiling.” The German photographer Thomas Ruff has taken photographs of the cosmos since1989, most recently experimenting with three-dimensional imagery of Mars. Christine Taylor Patten, anartist who lives in a remote corner of New Mexico, has been staring at the heavens even longer, makingdrawings for three decades that recall the brilliance of desert skies at night. “I’ve been obsessed with acertain kind of movement,” she says, “probably from watching the stars all the time.”

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But many artists are less interested in invoking the im-agery of galactic phenomena than with restaging their ownfantastic voyages and more closely examining the mechanicsof how we envision and approach outer space. At New York’sPark Avenue Armory this spring (through June 17), TomSachs is staging “Space Program 2.0: Mars,” filling the55,000-square-foot drill hall with his own reenactment of atrip to Mars. (He previously “journeyed” to the moon, in2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.) For the Armoryinstallation, he created a spacecraft, exploratory vehicles,and a Martian landscape, where a crew of studio assistantscan rip open the “floor” of the planet and take core samplesof soil to be “analyzed” by scientists.Sachs’s mock trip to the planet whose atmosphere most re-

sembles Earth’s has its comic aspects to be sure, but his un-derlying aim is partly serious. “The American space programdrew to a close last year,” he says. “I take it to be my respon-sibility personally to hold the mantle high for future genera-tions of American astronauts to look to the stars with theidea that we might someday return.”Similarly, Brian McCutcheon combined video, photography,

and sculpture for his project “Out of this World” at the Indi-anapolis Museum of Art last fall and winter. It featured anadaptation of an actual space probe, replicas of uniformsworn by astronauts during NASA’s Mercury program, videosof John Glenn’s voyage reenacted by the artist’s son, Angus,and a series of “alien landscapes”—photographs of Mc-Cutcheon and Angus in astronaut suits going about everydaytasks in suburban Indianapolis.“When I was first approached to do a project for the mu-

seum,” McCutcheon says, “my son was four years old andinterested in space-related imagery. We were reading to-

gether about the space programs in the 1960s, and I quicklyrealized that I was four years old at the same time thatApollo landed on the moon. The work I’d done prior to thathas a masculine American theme, and it seemed natural tome to make the connection between the launch of the spaceprogram and the risk-taking of tktktk [still getting clarifica-tion for quote].”Kansas-based artist Randy Regier has also riffed on macho

themes in his works, particularly in a series of “toys” thatshow superheroes stripped to their Skivvies or goony astro-nauts looking helpless and overloaded in comical spacesuits.As an art student in his mid-30s, Regier constructed a space-ship made from found objects, including a sea-mine casingfrom World War II and parts of a grain elevator. (The piecewas later exhibited, along with a fanciful astronaut’s suitthat seemed to have been fashioned from flea-market finds,in the 2010 Biennial at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln,Massachusetts.)“I wanted to create a spaceship that was so believable I

myself could believe in it,” Regier says. If it looks like some-thing the Soviets might have produced, that’s because Regierstudied one of the premier collections of Russian spacecraftat the Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas.Right now he is creating a new body of work about satellites,with narratives taken from texts in popular-science maga-zines from the 1950s and ’60s.

A CERTAIN HUMOR and playfulness aboutouter space have also imbued the work of Mariko Mori, aJapanese artist now living in New York. In Subway (1994),Mori had herself photographed in a metallic costume, a kindof demure Barbarella getup that included a headset and pushbuttons on her forearm. For Play with Me, from the sameyear, she posed as a sexy cyborg in long blue pigtails and sil-very armor, standing outside a Tokyo department store. Oneof her most ambitious projects was Wave UFO (2003), ashimmering fiberglass capsule shaped like an outsize space-age teardrop, which visitors entered to hook themselves upto computers that analyzed their brain waves.“The UFO is a metaphor for going to another world,” Mori

says, an idea that has fascinated her since childhood. “When Iwas growing up in Tokyo, the most popular TV animation wasAstro Boy. Unconsciously, I may have been influenced by theshow. I was always curious about what the future would belike.”It’s the ancillary aspects of space travel—telescopes, star

maps, unmanned satellites, and the like—that fascinate otherartists. “To better understand the universe, I started becoming

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LEFT Brian McCutcheon and his son, Angus,play ball in Play, 2011, from the AlienLandscape series, part of his “Out of ThisWorld” project at the Indianapolis Museumof Art. They wore astronaut suits whilegoing about their everyday activities

OPPOSITE Randy Regier’s NuPenny: LoveYou Forever Robot, 2010, 181⁄2 inches tall,from his “NuPenny Toy Store” installation.

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interested in what I call the architecture of science,” says LeahBeeferman, whose largely abstract drawings and animationsfind inspiration in “structures and instruments” rather than inhuman space flight. “Satellites, telescopes, and the spacecraftwe send out are the only way most humans can actually expe-rience space, and we need to have some kind of relationshipwith them in order to know what all of this means,” she says.

AT THE CORE of many artists’ forays into outerspace is an underlying narrative. Regier, for instance, callshimself “a storyteller at heart,” while British-born photogra-phers Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, who collaborateas Kahn & Selesnick, construct fantastical journeys to themoon and Mars. In The Apollo Prophecies (2002–6) the artistswere “trying to do our own version of the Apollolaunch,” says Selesnick, “and so we recreated themoon in our studio and photographed panoramas”—which included an armored elephant pulling a rocket,spongy-looking meteors, and lunar explorers wearingheavy fur coats.

“We had this notion that the Edwardians settledthere and prophesized the coming of the NASA astro-nauts,” he continues. “We used that as a starting pointto construct our own mythology.” The viewer couldfollow them as they touched down in a settlement onthe moon and were greeted as gods before returningto Earth with canisters of “Moon Paste.”For their latest series of photos, “Mars: Adrift on the Hour-

glass Sea,” the artists sent two female protagonists to the RedPlanet, where they discovered Stone Age monuments andhigh-tech devices littering a landscape crafted from NASA’shigh-resolution photomosaics and shots taken in the South-west. “The underlying message is a little dark,” says Se-lesnick, “but there’s some optimism that human ingenuityallows us to explore these places.”The “dark” side of space travel is critical to California artist

Trevor Paglen’s photographs of covert satellite missions. Asboth an investigative journalist and a fine-arts photographer,Paglen has been tracking clandestine military operations,such as ostensibly civilian airplanes that are in fact doing un-dercover work. “In learning to track airplanes, I found outabout some people who had developed ways to track spysatellites,” he says. In his series “The Other Night Sky,” stun-

ning skyscapes offer otherworldly glimpses of the craft thegovernment sends up on spy missions.There are a number of amateur astronomers who follow

these satellites “for fun,” he says. “I’ve met a lot of them. I visitthem in different places. We e-mail numbers and with thosenumbers you can model orbits, and when you can model orbits,then you can predict where things are going to be in the sky.”Paglen is not the only artist to collaborate with the scientific

community, whether official or amateur “citizen” scientists.Sachs spent a residency at a jet-propulsion laboratory, and theItalian-born installation artist Luca Buvoli has participated inNASA training experiments as part of a long-term project hecalls “Running on the Moon.” “I’m more interested in thesense of disorientation and vertigo, and the physiological tests

to train astronauts allow me to experience this,” he says. “Thisvertigo parallels the downfall of the heroic astronaut and is ametaphor for our existential disorientation at a time whenmajor ideologies are collapsing.”Carrie Paterson, who has been researching outer space for

more than a decade as a basis for her art, is working with or-ganic chemist and glassblower Bob Maiden to produce multi-layered glass spheres designed to carry scents that will soothethe homesick space traveler. A few miles from her studio inPasadena, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has also served as asource for investigations into the mysteries of space travel.Just as Paglen works with hobbyist astronomers, curator

Tyler Stallings, whose show “Free Enterprise: The Art of CitizenSpace Exploration” will be seen next year at the Sweeney ArtGallery at the University of California, Riverside, commentsthat the “idea of citizen scientists, a burgeoning movement,

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OPPOSITE Visitors entered Mariko Mori’sWave UFO, 2003, to have their brain wavesanalyzed by computers (top). LeahBeeferman’s installation Journeys into theUnknown . . . (detail), 2010, was inspired by“structures and instruments” rather thanhuman space flight (bottom).

RIGHT Kahn & Selesnick, Earthrise, 2010,from the series Mars: Adrift on theHourglass Sea, in which two femaleexplorers find the planet littered with StoneAge monuments and high-tech devices.

shows a shift from scientists informing the public about what’sgood for them to research often done by amateurs.”His show touches on the implications of civilian space travel,

as exploration of the heavens moves away from government-sponsored agencies toward a free-market, private-enterprisemodel. One of the artists in the show, photographer ConnieSamaras, has been documenting the building of the Spaceportin southern New Mexico, the world’s first commercial hub forsending ordinary travelers into the stratosphere.“A lot of my work is about imaginary futures,” Samaras

says. “I’m more interested in taking photographs that exist inthat space between fiction and the real world.”And if regular trips to outer space are a possibility within

our lifetime, surely lunar real-estate ventures can’t be far be-hind. The artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger,who call their collaboration eteam, are developing a projectfor Stallings’s show that explores access to “private property”on the moon, playing off real huckster sites like Lunar RealEstate and the Moon Shop. “Suppose you owned a piece ofland that you could never set foot on,” says Lamprecht. “Isthat place existent or nonexistent? What makes you theowner? Can you exploit it or not?”Like many of the artists intrigued by outer space, Lam-

precht and Moderegger can recall the excitement of the earlyNASA ventures. “I remember the moment when Apollolanded,” says Moderegger. “We all gathered around the TVand were totally mesmerized. The scenes were grainy andnoisy, but they were happening in real time. Someone wasgetting out of the spacecraft and walking on the moon!”Lamprecht, who grew up in East Germany, says, “I was

super-fascinated with the Russian space program and proudthat they were the first ones to go out there. This was one ofthe great heroic moments for Communist countries.”Kahn and Selesnick felt the same wonder. “For both

Nicholas and me, one of our earliest memories was of astro-nauts landing on the moon,” says Selesnick. “We would havebeen about four or five. It seemed like an incredible uniting

event. It’s hard to think of anything since that has been theequivalent of that. Those events inspired us to go back tothose memories and rethink those stories.”

BUT FOR OTHER ARTISTS, the affinitygoes even deeper. “Why am I so interested in outer space?”asks Carrie Paterson. “From a personal perspective, this is thebest metaphor that I have to describe those relatives who es-caped the Holocaust and became detached from their originalculture. The astronaut is the perfect analogue for the dias-poric person who’s suspended in space and time. . . . Alien-ation is a significant part of the work I do.”Samaras, also, connects her interest in alien landscapes to

her childhood. “Growing up in a Greek immigrant communityduring the Cold War, especially in New Mexico, I felt that theculture was really not part of the U.S., but off the planet,”she says. “And then there was the hush-hush military atmos-phere of the region,” which is not far from Los Alamos,where classified work on nuclear weapons first took place.Whatever the reasons for their enthrallment with space,

and in spite of a waning interest in its possibilities among thegeneral public, many artists remain optimistic about theprospect of finding brave new worlds. Jina Brenneman, cura-tor of the University of New Mexico’s Harwood Museum ofArt, in Taos, first became fascinated with pulling together ashow about artists and the cosmos when she heard about theTate in Space program, in 2002, when Tate Modern an-nounced that its next outpost will be in outer space, in theform of a module that will dock at the International SpaceStation as its cultural component.Brenneman, whose exhibition at the Harwood, “Machine

Wilderness (in Zero Gravity),” opens in October, says, “Themain thing for me is that I don’t want to be with the post-apocalyptic camp. I got enough of that in Mad Max. I’m moreinterested in showing those artists who want us to end up ina good place, one where we are using space and technologyand science to make our world better.” �

LEFT Luca Buvoli, Day 41: VerticalOscillator (Study for Poster)(detail), 2011–12. He hasparticipated in NASA trainingexperiments.

OPPOSITE Two from the exhibition“Free Enterprise: The Art of CitizenSpace Exploration.” Richard Clar,Spaceflight Dolphin, 1982. Dolphin“voices” transmitted from thesculpture-satellite might be detectedby an extraterrestrial intelligence(top). Kitsou Dubois, Perspectives,le temps de voir, 2009, video stillimage by Loic Parent extracted from3D screening of acrobats inweightlessness environment(bottom). TH

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